It made me mad.
“Come on,” says I to Catty. “Let’s knock some manners into ’em. A good lickin’s goin’ to open up their eyes to who’s a tramp and who hain’t.”
“No,” says he, after a minute. “I’d like to. Gosh! how I’d like to, but it wouldn’t do. I’m tryin’ to be respectable. If you was to fight, nobody’d think anything about it; but if I was to fight, everybody ’d say I was a rowdy and maybe I’d git arrested or somethin’. Wee-wee, I jest got to be respectable.”
“You hain’t afraid, be you?” says I, kind of looking at him edgeways.
“If you think I be,” says he, “come on off alone somewheres where nobody ’ll see us. I figger to show you mighty sudden.”
So that was all right. If he was the kind of a fellow that was afraid of a bang in the nose I didn’t want to take any trouble for him, but he wasn’t. So Banty and Skoodles got off without a licking that day. I just yelled to them to mosey along because I was able to pick my company and ’most generally stuck to what I picked. So they hollered back something disagreeable and went along.
I made up my mind right there that the first time I ketched either of them alone I’d knock him into a peaked hat. Nobody could blame Catty for what I did.
“We will go to see that painter—Mr. Jones,” said Catty.
So we went up to Sands Jones’s house, and there he was, standing just outside the kitchen door with an ax in his hand, like he was going to chop wood. He looked at the ax and then he looked at the wood and then he breathed hard and rested the ax-head on the ground and looked over the garden fence. Mrs. Jones poked her head out of the door.
“Sands Jones,” she said, “don’t you think I can’t see where you’re lookin’—over the back fence toward the river. I’m watchin’ you, too. You git to splittin’ if you expect to eat. Now chop, Sands, chop. I hain’t goin’ to move off’n this spot till that ax-head hits a block of wood.”